Vitalik's new article: The Foundation is just an ordinary node; maintaining ETH's value depends on the big players stepping up

Author: Vitalik Buterin

Translation: Yuliya, PANews

On May 25th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a personal long article about the future development direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). In the article, he elaborated in detail on the organizational transformation the foundation is undergoing, strategic adjustments in resource allocation, and how Ethereum should maintain its uniqueness amid an increasingly competitive technological wave. He emphasized that Ethereum’s core competitiveness does not lie in simply pursuing extreme TPS, but in excelling in censorship resistance, decentralization, and security (CROPS). Below is the translated original content.

Regarding where the Ethereum Foundation (EF) should go in the future, I want to share some of my personal views.

First, I declare that this is just my personal opinion. The foundation is not solely decided by me; I have no special privileges on the board. This transformation is mainly being implemented by Aerugo, with me primarily responsible for providing some technical ideas. Currently, the board is recruiting new members, and my influence within the foundation is gradually diminishing. Honestly, that’s exactly what I hope for.

By 2025, the foundation’s operational efficiency has improved significantly, solving many old problems. But earlier this year, I developed a new concern. I often hear complaints like: “Vitalik is out there hyping Ethereum’s decentralization, privacy, and security to the skies, but the foundation itself is doing the exact opposite?”

You might have heard different opinions. Maybe you think everything is fine now, there’s no crisis, and you even believe the foundation is finally taking execution and business expansion seriously—just keep going. If that’s true, then you and I might have disagreements on questions like “what kind of criticism I value most” and “which critics’ criticisms hurt me the most.”

To clarify, I’ll use an analogy from another circle.

Regarding Google, you can see it as a successful company that has organized information for all humanity—an admirable achievement. But you can also see it this way: it started with the slogan “Don’t be evil,” with lofty ideals, but later it picked up the typical flaws of big corporations, gradually losing its original mission.

My view of Google falls somewhere in between. But if there were a button that could send me back to 2008, forcing Google to inject a bit of “rigor” and “idealism” (for example, giving open-source advocate Richard Stallman permanent veto power over Google’s policies), I would press it without hesitation.

Why? Because a company’s choices affect the entire world. The broader tech environment Google has been part of—past and present—has deviated from the early idealistic “Don’t be evil” foundation. Everyone is chasing money, building authoritarian super AIs, infiltrated by anti-social personalities, even bowing to government surveillance and authoritarian power for profit. When everyone is going with the flow, if a big company stands out as a “rebel,” sticking to its bottom line, that’s a huge benefit for societal freedom and stability. That’s what I understand as diversification.

This idea isn’t unique to me; Aya and others at the foundation also think this way when formulating our “mission.”

So, what does this have to do with the Ethereum Foundation?

The foundation has never been the “center” of Ethereum; it’s just one of countless nodes in the ecosystem, with a specific mission. We’ve always said this, but many in the community (even inside the foundation) insist on treating us as the “big brother.” Now, we want to prove through action: we are truly just an ordinary node.

This is very important because the foundation’s capacity is limited, and so are our funds. We only hold about 0.16% of ETH (less than many large Ethereum holders), while other blockchain projects often hold 10% to 50% of their tokens. Financially, the Ethereum Foundation was initially defined by the token sale documents and other startup materials to perform limited tasks (including building chain software, completing phases like Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity). These tasks were fully accomplished by 2022. It was never meant to rule Ethereum forever.

Therefore, today, the foundation chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue long-term development rather than blind expansion (yes, this also means we will reduce ETH sell-offs). Going forward, the foundation will only do one thing: focus on activities that are critical to Ethereum’s core—those that ensure Ethereum remains resistant to censorship, capture, open, private, and secure (we call this CROPS), and that cannot be done without our help.

This entails making tough choices. In some cases, even activities and individuals we highly respect and deeply value will be excluded from EF. If we want important tasks to attract outside capital, then it’s necessary to keep talents with outstanding technical skills, respect from the public, and alignment with our mission and CROPS outside the EF. This also means the EF must adopt a principled stance culturally.

All of this is to cooperate with other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world also highly value CROPS and related principles. But high respect does not equal specialization and full dedication to a single domain (just as I think animal protection is important, I love vegetarian food, but I can’t eat vegetarian every meal).

The foundation is still in a transition period, and it will probably take several more months to fully settle. What will the future EF look like? From a technical perspective, my core requirements are:

Ethereum must be astonishing.

We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and rapid technological development. “Maintaining the current EVM, with one or two hard forks per year to optimize short-term user needs” is no longer enough to be compelling.

For some, “astonishing” means: 250 milliseconds latency and 1 million TPS. I believe Ethereum’s attempt to pursue this is a mistake. Chasing speed and scalability as much as possible, while only slightly reducing decentralization compared to other chains, is a path to mediocrity. If we try to go this route, we will definitely fail.

Ethereum should certainly scale, but on another dimension—CROPS (Censorship resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security)—we must excel.

Specifically:

A bug-free Ethereum. Half a year ago, security experts would have thought this was a pipe dream. But now, with AI-assisted verification, it’s almost a reality. We must be first in this area.

Unbreakable consensus mechanisms. Ethereum is (and will continue to be, with lean consensus) the only chain capable of achieving two key points: first, traditional BFT-style properties, meaning safety under asynchronous conditions with high fault tolerance; second, Bitcoin-style PoW properties, meaning safety against 49% attacks under synchronous conditions. To my knowledge, no other chain has or plans to have both. Other chains either only achieve one or the other. I’ve argued many times that for chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, if 34% of nodes go offline, they cannot rely on “pulling the network cable” or social consensus to recover. For chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, this is acceptable. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it’s unacceptable.

Reducing intermediaries. Many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on third-party relays to broadcast transactions, which is embarrassing and a security risk. Therefore, FOCIL and EIP-8141 (along with earlier proposals like 7701 and years of work) aim to minimize middlemen in transaction submission through truly general methods, using public mempools and strong on-chain inclusion features, covering protocols like secp256r1 and privacy schemes. Kohaku is pushing at the user layer to eliminate intermediaries, moving Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo where wallets don’t even verify the chain and send private data to multiple third-party servers, toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some goals may be unrealistic; perhaps achieving 50% is good enough if we rely on intermediaries. But just going halfway won’t make Ethereum’s CROPS capabilities truly impressive. We must aim for 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which remains a major research focus (especially in state scaling). Well-designed Layer 2 solutions can help, especially those optimized for specific applications (like high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul’s work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals are compatible even with significantly shortened block times (slot times).

In essence, the most valuable “product” of the Ethereum blockchain is ETH itself. Ethereum now safeguards assets worth $250 billion. The various features I mentioned above are highly beneficial for ETH’s value.

Personally, nearly 90% of my funds are ETH, and the remaining 40 million on-chain fiat are donated to open-source biotech, software, or hardware projects.

However, maintaining ETH’s value is not something the foundation can control alone. It requires other major players in the ecosystem (some holding more ETH than the foundation) to step up. The foundation has recently been exploring ways to support these new organizations early on.

In summary, the future Ethereum Foundation will have fewer people, a stronger stance (sometimes perhaps incomprehensible), but it will last longer. Its purpose is to ensure Ethereum leaves something meaningful for the world. Thanks to everyone inside and outside the foundation helping to realize this goal.